Man of the Flood is a five-member progressive indie rock band from Fort Wayne featuring Jess Grant on keyboard and backing vocals, Clayton Beehler on drums, Quinn Heiking on guitar and vocals, Justin Wu on bass, and Loui Al-Ayoubi on lead guitar and, as he puts it, "the mustache."
What began as a dorm room project during the pandemic has grown into one of the city's most exciting local acts, delivering " indie music you can mosh to." Ahead of their performance at WBOI Music Presents: Live & Local at The Landing, WBOI's Brianna Barrow spoke with the band to discuss their unique origin story, DIY approach to making music, and what makes Fort Wayne's local music scene so special.
2026 Performance Schedule
- May 29th: Los Electro (Psychedelic Cumbria and Latin Rock)
- June 26th: Man of the Flood (Progressive Indie Rock)
- July 31st: Anthony Giraldi (Soul, R&B, Indie)
- August 28th: Funayūrei (Synthwave)
- September 25th: The Thinning (Indie Rock)
This season of Live and Local at The Landing is made possible with support from the Ardelle and Theresa Glaze Foundation as part of WBOI’s Amplify All project.
This season of Live and Local at The Landing is made possible with support from the Ardelle and Theresa Glaze Foundation as part of WBOI’s Amplify All project.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I'm joined now by Man of the Flood. Thank you, guys, for being here.
Everyone: Thank you.
Jess Grant: I’m Jess. I play keyboard, and I do some backing vocals.
Clayton Beehler: I'm Clayton. I'm the drummer.
Quinn Heiking: I'm Quinn. I play guitar and sing.
Justin Wu: My name is Justin, and I play bass.
Loui Al-Ayoubi: Hey, I'm Loui, and I play lead guitar and the mustache.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I'm really excited to know what that means–I'll find out? Okay, all right. I love a surprise. For listeners who may be discovering you guys at live and local for the first time. How would you describe your sound?
Jess Grant: Indie music that you can mosh too.
Quinn Heiking: Yeah, I like that.
Clayton Beehler: Yeah, that's a pretty good descriptor, like progressive indie rock.
Justin Wu: The sound was already there when I had joined the band, so I kind of joined when the album was already finished and recorded. It really kind of hit home, when I heard the first song, I heard “Bathwater”, and I don't know, just it just reminded me of everyone's personality. I mean, I know everyone individually as a musician, and so I could really hear their creative differences within their albums and the parts.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: So I read that the band started as a dorm room project between Quinn and Clayton. Did you guys ever imagine it would grow into what it is now?
Clayton Beehler: I would say, yeah. I mean, that was the goal, was to make like good music that we liked, that you know, got semi popular, and I'd say in the Fort Wayne area, like we've done a really good job, and a lot of people know us, and I think we're pretty proud of how it turned out.
Jess, do you want to tell them the story?
Jess Grant: Yeah, so the way I met these guys is I got into college fall of 2020 so there wasn't a lot going on because of Covid and everything, and I was like, I don't have any friends that live in my dorm building, so I made these little business cards with my social media and stuff on them, and I slid them under everybody's door, and the only people that replied to little old me was Quinn and Clayton, and we started hanging out, and I think, like, maybe it was only like two weeks after we started hanging out, they were like, "We have a question to ask you.”
I was so scared, I thought they were mad at me. They were not mad at me, they wanted me to be their keys player. And here we are. And who would have thought a little business card would have ended up with me playing Middle Waves yesterday, or not yesterday, Saturday.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Wow, that's amazing. What do you guys remember about that experience?
Clayton Beehler: Yeah, I mean, we were just chilling at the time, and Quinn and I, at the time, were kind of in a similar boat. We're like, we were just hanging out, but, like, we didn't have that many other friends, besides just each other and a couple other people. So, when someone was like, "We're looking for friends, we're like, "Hell yeah.” And so, we, you know, hit them up, and we started hanging out, and we had been looking for a keys player for a while, or thinking about it, and she said she played keys, so it just seemed logical, and it worked out really well.
Then she ended up moving in, like this was completely unplanned, but she ended up moving just right across the hall, like from where we live. So we were right there, like we could write or work on things anytime. And from there, I mean, we've had a bunch of members over time, but in the past year and a half or so, we added Loui, and then we added Justin, and this is just a super solid lineup we have right now, that's awesome.
Quinn Heiking: Totally agreed.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I love the idea, just sliding a business card under the door. What a cool journey. So, I also read that you describe yourselves as a DIY band. Could you explain what that means?
Quinn Heiking: Yeah, pretty much everything we do, for the most part, is entirely done in house. I mean, we made all the merch at home. We recorded the whole most recent record at home. We sent it off to someone else to mix, which we hadn't done before.
That was a really cool experience, but, like, yeah, I make the art. We shoot the music videos ourselves. We love making art and doing stuff, so whenever we can, we do it ourselves.
Clayton Beehler: Also, shout out Shelby, our manager, who's not here, also helps with, like, a lot of the, like, oh yeah, just keeping us organized, stuff like that.
But if you have not checked out the Music video for portraits, that's one that was like Quinn's brainchild. He spent like sixty hours editing it, and it's not gotten the views it deserves. So you have to go watch that video, it's so good.
Jess Grant: He cut off all his hair for the video.
Clayton Beehler: Yes, he did.
Jess Grant: You have to watch the video.
Quinn Heiking: Yeah, a little over a year ago I had hair down to about nipple height, and then I cut it like five different ways, like slowly getting shorter for a music video concept I had, and that was just a really insane thing to flesh out, but I think it turned out really cool, and it's, uh, it's definitely strange.
Clayton Beehler: But one time we rented out a space in Indianapolis, and we had, like, there's like a dance crew. Also, there was one time we went to just a random parking lot, we had like no plan, and we just made it work. That was Long Way Home.
The first one was for a music video called Honey, and that one was in the dorm room, Quinn and I were living at the time.
Loui Al-Ayoubi: I think it cost us seventy cents.
Clayton Beehler: Yeah, we had like this–
Loui Al-Ayoubi: We had to buy, we had to buy a cucumber because one of the scenes featured me laying in our, my dorm room bathtub with like cucumbers on my eyes, like I was at the spa.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Sometimes it's almost like being restricted by a budget forces you to think in a creative way.
Loui Al-Ayoubi: One hundred percent.
Clayton Beehler: Yeah, totally.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And you just released “Sorry Puppy!”
Clayton Beehler: Yeah.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: How did that, what inspired that record?
Loui Al-Ayoubi: Well, if you've ever felt like a doormat…
Clayton Beehler: I knew this was coming.
Quinn Heiking: No, it's a “Sorry Puppy!” is a... it's probably our most angsty work, for sure. So far, you know, we started the project during Covid, like Man of the Flood, and so our earlier stuff is like a lot more chill, because, you know, shows weren't happening, and as things have ramped up since then, I feel like our music has gotten a lot more energetic, and especially this record is definitely our highest energy, maybe angriest at some point record.
Jess Grant: Maybe a good overarching theme would kind of be like growing pains–
Quinn Heiking: Oh, I like that a lot.
Jess Grant: To some degree? Yeah, like I feel like a lot of the songs are kind of just about getting older and more mature and life changing a little bit, and that can feel,
Clayton Beehler: Yeah, I'd say that's fair.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And you mentioned being a little bit of a doormat, I mean, I can see you guys are all, you know, maybe in your twenties, early twenties, and so you know, you kind of are learning… heartbreak, maybe not being a people pleaser? Kind of those lessons that you learn in your early twenties.
Quinn Heiking: Precisely.
Jess Grant: Oh yeah.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: So, I want to talk about live and local a little bit as well. So, this season of Live and Local at the Landing was made possible with support from the Ardell and Theresa Glaze Foundation as a part of WBOI's Amplify All project, and one of the goals of Live and Local is really just to spotlight the local talent here in Fort Wayne, local artists, and give them a platform to share their music. I want to hear from each of you what events like this kind of mean for you as a local artist.
Jess Grant: I actually work at Marquee at the landing, so I'm on the landing all the time, and we've been wanting to play over there for quite a while, and it's kind of exciting to get to do it now. Every summer, I've always heard the other bands kind of playing out there, so getting the opportunity to play the same stage as some of the other local talent is going to be really exciting.
Clayton Beehler: Yeah, I mean, over the years, we've gotten to do a lot of cool, different things, like we've done, like Celestial Fest at Ambrosia Orchard, and that's always fun. Like, we've done various, like, charity gigs here in Fort Wayne, stuff like that. It's just cool to be involved with the city, and there's so many.. I like, it's kind of a slept on city, there's some bands are like really, really good, like just cool to be a part of stuff like that.
Quinn Heiking: Yeah, totally agreed. I think putting together events like this, especially in like The Landing area, is a really nice way to liven up the space and make it a nice, exciting like Friday night, Friday summer night. It's going to be gorgeous out there, great food, great music, great vibes, and I think that's really important to building a community.
Loui Al-Ayoubi: Yeah, I think it's so my context is a bit different too. I think it's beautiful to see this music community sort of thrive, especially because I come from a lot of bigger cities, that's not a flex, but you know, you have a lot of musicians that never really get to meet each other. There's not a lot of like local support for one another. There's a lot of separation in a lot of music communities around the world.
So, to see Fort Wayne kind of band together, everybody seems to know one another, everybody seems to care about each other's music. I think it's very important to spotlight local bands, because I mean, Man of the Flood wouldn't exist if it didn't happen in the Midwest, with a bunch of different ideas coming together, that's how you get such a unique sound. Otherwise, you just end up very one dimensional.
So, this sort of spotlight, I think, is very important to show Fort Wayne other types of music exist outside of very specific genres that tend to be here.
Justin Wu: I'm actually from Virginia, and so the music scene there wasn't really, it didn't really exist. And so moving here, like a much smaller city, much smaller town, playing gigs like back to back all the time, never really played gigs that much back at home. It kind of just opened my mind up a lot to how big the scene here was compared to my hometown.
I'm so super grateful to play all these shows back to back, whenever, like, I told the last interview session that we were at, I'd never really been in a band that had this much motion, and so, yeah, it's been a fun, it's been a fun time.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: But I mean, that's cool to hear too, especially being from bigger cities or different states, to hear that there is something special about the Fort Wayne community, and you know, we think so too, and so that's why we like to do this.
And I know you mentioned Celestial Fest, is that SUN.DYLE’s?
Everyone: Yes! Yeah that is yeah.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, okay, yeah, SUN.DYLE, they're awesome too. We had them on last year.
Clayton Beehler: Yeah, they’re awesome.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: They're an amazing group of people. And so, yeah, it's just super cool to see how connected the local music scene is, like you guys mentioned. So, yeah, very special.
I also want to talk a little bit about your performance. What can people expect at Live and local at The Landing?
Quinn Heiking: Some new ones, some old ones, some covers, lots of fun dancing around.
Loui Al-Ayoubi: If you're hearing this and you're there, don't just stand there, it's going to be a comfortable, safe place for you to dance. If you’ve ever seen me on stage, or Quinn on stage, or any of us on stage, we make a fool of ourselves. We look stupid. But it's cool because we look stupid.
Quinn Heiking: That's what it’s all about.
Loui Al-Ayoubi: Everybody should be dancing together. I want to see everybody dancing if you're out.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Well, thank you guys so much for your time today. We're really looking forward to your performance, and can't wait to see what you guys have in store.
Everyone: Thank you so much. Hey, we're Man of the Flood, and this is “Bathwater” on WBOI.
The following song, “Bathwater,” was provided by Man of the Flood ahead of the band’s performance at WBOI Music Presents: Live and Local at The Landing on June 26th, 2026.
